All Ears Audiobooks discussion

Telex from Cuba: A Novel

I just finished this (see my review Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fictional autobiography of a boy whose father ran the Cuban United Fruit Company plantation. The book starts a decade before the revolution and describes the haughtiness and privileged attitude of the US corporation. At first I thought the book was apologetic toward prejudice and subservience. The author does a good job looking through the eyes of the characters.

Characters include corporate executives, human traffickers, weapons smugglers, Americans able to dodge prison by working overseas, Cuban revolutionaries, Baptista and Prijo, servants, poor laborers, strip club dancers, and the corporation's children. The children get glimpses of the sordid and unjust but interpret it in their naiveté as how things should be.

The book presents the Castros as taking advantage of a situation and not as saviors nor as culprits. It presents Prijo fairly sympathetically as a wounded leader who's suckered due to his vanity. It's less sympathetic with Baptista.

I definitely recommend the book.

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Don, thanks for highlighting this book. It happens to be my bookclub's selection for this month. I'm only half-way through the book and it is definitely an eye opener. Talk about the 'Ugly American' - there are so many passages filled with American superiority and prejudice that I'm finding it a hard one to consume. Before I started this book, everything I knew about Cuba could be summarized by 1 - You can't get a visa (at least directly) to visit Cuba and 2 - Because of fact #1, Cuban cigars are highly valued contraband. Definitely learning a lot more through this book!